June 18, 2005

Life Near the Fast Lane

By Erica Gies
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

Stalled in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Highway 101 between the Vermont and Cesar Chavez exits, a driver's eye may be drawn to the few tracts of greenery on San Francisco's freeway corridor. But while the plants provide visual relief from the concrete jungle, this habitat close to San Francisco General Hospital seems fairly inhospitable to life.

However, just as 101 links us to where we want to go, these border lands, owned and managed by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), serve as a sort of freeway for critters, providing birds, bugs, and mammals with a “right-of-way” to a patchwork of nearby green spaces: pocket parks, hillsides, community gardens, and backyards.

"Habitat associated with even the Caltrans corridor is a good potential part of the overall urban natural landscape that we want to protect and restore and steward," said Peter Brastow, director of Nature in the City, a nonprofit whose mission is to connect people with urban nature.
When a city road was widened into Highway 101 in 1954, Caltrans planted the land with Algerian ivy, eucalyptus and pine trees, and melaleuca bushes, according to Jack Knudson, a Caltrans landscape supervisor. Former Caltrans area superintendent Larry Stringer added that the area also contains bottlebrush and plum trees, and invasive weeds like sweet anise.

These inhospitable nonnative plants, combined with the generally degraded local environment, make for poor habitat. "Right near the freeway there's altered air flow, excess nitrogen plume from exhaust, altered drainage," said Barbara Deutsch, an amateur lepidopterist who lives on nearby Bernal Hill and maintains a pesticide-free garden with butterfly-friendly plants.

Yet despite the challenging conditions, a surprising array of beings use the Caltrans land and the green areas abutting it. Edward Hatter, executive director of Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, a community center five blocks from the freeway, has spotted wildlife in the area. "…we have raccoons, quail, more pigeons than we can stand, field mice, we have black birds – ravens – and we've spotted a few hawks flying through..."

Other birds have also been documented. Jeanne Darrah, parent to two children at Buena Vista Alternative Elementary School on 25th Street, recruited an ornithologist to identify area birds with the kids. They promoted the pigeons to "rock doves," and spotted Hatter's ravens, red-tailed hawks, white crown sparrows, black phoebes, yellow-rumped warblers, song sparrows, robins, Anna's hummingbirds, starlings, bluejays, mourning doves, house finches, chickadees, western gulls, and American goldfinches.

The nearby land also hosts coast live oak, a native that’s perhaps spread through the droppings of intrepid bluejays; kestrels, a bird of prey; anise swallowtail, Virginia lady, and an as-yet-unnamed species of harvestmen, a native arachnid found under the area’s characteristic serpentine rock.

The Caltrans land itself is mostly ill-suited to all but the hardiest of species, particularly due to the heavy ivy coverage. "… ivy is one of the most counterproductive treatments of the ground because it's evergreen and it completely shades the ground. There is no natural community that has that condition. It primarily fosters snails and rats," said Deutsch.

Peter Berg, director of Planet Drum, an organization that advocates a bioregional basis for urban sustainability, agrees, calling ivy a "form of green pavement" and says its presence eliminates the healthy benefits of a native landscape.

Caltrans spokesperson Jeff Weiss doesn't foresee the Hospital Curve ivy being replaced with native plants any time soon. "The ivy is thriving in that location, and it's much cheaper to keep those plants than to re-landscape that area," he said. "Given the fiscal situation the state finds itself in, if it works, don't fix it."

"There's always a difference between price and cost," Berg countered. "They're talking about price. The social cost of having exotic vegetation there is that it degrades the urban environment, and it deprives the public of contact with natural elements of native species, which are known to be beneficial for consciousness, recreation, and mental well-being…"

While Weiss pointed to funding priorities like seismic retrofitting of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, he didn't rule out the possibility of re-landscaping Hospital Curve altogether.

"Caltrans is moving toward more local control of projects. Caltrans used to receive 75 percent of the state transportation budget for projects. But in the late '90s the funding scheme was inverted, where the local cities and counties controlled 75 percent of the funding and Caltrans controlled 25 percent. That's not to say we're not involved, but the city decides where money is allocated. So if someone in San Francisco wanted to relandscape an area, it's more likely the project would be initiated by the city and county of San Francisco than by Caltrans."
But while Nature in the City's Brastow is intrigued to hear about the funding restructuring, he isn't willing to let Caltrans just pass the buck onto the community.

"We want anybody who owns public land to take as good of care of it as they can, and manage for natural resources and habitat value," said Brastow. "And we're not just talking about the National Park Service and the Rec & Park Department, who, in general, are doing a great job at managing their land for natural resources and habitat value. But also DPW and Caltrans."